Saturday, February 13, 2010

The NCAA mock selection committee - made up of 20 members of the media - met this past Thursday and Friday and came up with their Field of 65. (Why no invite for B101?)

The field was created as if the season ended last week and was based on a set of fictional results and scenarios put forth by the NCAA. In this mock scenario, for example, Georgetown was the Big East champ, Duke beat Virginia in the ACC final, and Iona (not Siena) won the MAAC.

While we don't put a whole lot of stock in the final bracket because it's done in mid-February and since it's put together under fake scenarios, the process of how the the committee selects the 65 teams is very interesting. This year, the NCAA documented the entire selection process - in some pretty intense detail - in a running blog on NCAA.org. Check it out here.

The final seed list (1-65) that the committee came up with can be viewed here.

A couple of quick notes we found interesting from the selection process: A team's record over its last 12 games no longer appears on the stat sheets used by the committee, and neither a lost of conference RPIs. Also, the committee first selects a group of "no-brainers" (or at-large teams that are definites) and then breaks down the remaining at-large candidates into small "lists" and analyzes teams against one another that way. The debates about these "lists" are pretty in-depth and lots of factors are considered. In one debate, it was brought up that one reason Dayton might have lost to Rhode Island on Jan. 26 was that the Flyers got sick after "eating bad cheesesteaks."

3 comments:

Justin
said...

I actually don't like the fact that they try to go that much more in depth about why a team lost or won a game. It gives them a lot more license to excuse a loss or dismiss a win if you want to go against the more objective measures of a team's worth.

Inevitably that brings in bias and allows them to just go with who they think are the "real" tourney teams for seeding or selection based on conventional wisdom about teams or just based on recognizable team names.

It makes sense that they would look into all kinds of trivia when trying to determine a team's position within one or two spots. They're deciding between the 28 and 29 seed where resumes start to look pretty similar. Ultimately while they discussed bad cheesesteaks they still seeded according to who won the game and not food poisoning issues. We need to remember that they're having an open discussion with people contributing whatever they feel is of interest. You can't have a decent discussion if people worry too much about how their contributions will be judged later. I'd rather they bring up something trivial, consider it, then discount it, than not bring something up that is important because they're worried about how it will sound. I guess that means I support keeping this part of the process behind closed doors.

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